As a Former Wine Store Owner, If I Had $20 to Spend on a Bottle of Wine This Is What I Would Buy
The same goes for €20, £20, C$20, AU$20...
One of my main aims as a wine writer who spent eight years at the coalface of wine retail and bar work is to give solid advice you can adopt when faced with wine in the real world.
It’s one of the reasons I don’t often focus on specific bottle recommendations. Don’t get me wrong, they can be useful and do have their place — and I sometimes dally in them myself— but they might not help you when faced with a wall of wine in a wine store, or a restaurant wine list.
Which is why I focus on advice that means you can make better buying decisions on your own.
Or to bastardise a famous phrase, give someone a $20 bottle and they’ll drink well for a day. But teach them how to buy properly and they’ll drink well for a lifetime.
I’ve got a whole series of articles like these, ones that give solid, practical advice for buying wine. Articles like:
You’ll find all advice articles in The Sauce’s wine section.
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Depending on your finances and willingness to spend on wine, $20 could seem like a heck of a lot.
The reality is that if you have an interest in expanding your wine knowledge, $20 is the pitch-perfect price point. At this level, you’re going to find some excellent bottles.
But it’s not a given. You can still go very wrong, especially if you love wines from expensive regions. Or choose the wrong store to buy wine from.
If I had $20 in my pocket and wanted to buy a bottle of wine with it, this is how I would do it.
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Avoid the supermarket
I’ve said it many times before and I’ll say it again — your secret weapon to buying great wine is to spend it in the right place. At the $20 price point, that means your local or online independent wine store.
You’d be forgiven for thinking a supermarket or generic liquor store would be the best places to find good value wines. After all, they do a reasonable job for your $7.
But back when I owned my wine store and bar, we would routinely buy supermarket wines to benchmark our bottles. Above $10, there was no contest. Our wines were better.
The $15-20 mark was where my independent retail store shone. As such, we worked incredibly hard within that price bracket to find amazing wines as cheaply as we could. I would try thousands of wines a year to find those gems.
And I wasn’t alone — wine trade tastings were always filled with independent wine store buyers doing exactly the same thing.
The $20 price bracket isn’t what the supermarkets or liquor stores aim for. Their bread is buttered at lower price points.
$20 isn’t well-spent there. Find the indies instead. Then do this:
The best tip I can ever give you.
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